The fate of Arm exposes the folly of adopting such an unquestioning approach. Shaken by the shock Brexit referendum result, May and her then-chancellor Philip Hammond were desperate to demonstrate to the world that Britain remained firmly open for business.
In their rush to unveil a big headline-grabbing deal, the pair allowed themselves to be persuaded that Softbank figurehead Masayoshi Son could be a trusted steward of Britain’s most promising home-grown tech company.
One of the pledges that Son made that convinced Hammond to throw his weight behind the deal without a national interest or security test was to double the number of engineers working at Arm. Yet, even that has now been broken.
Although the number employed in the UK at one stage had jumped from nearly 1,800 to more than 3,500, a round of recent job cuts and departures across the group has reduced the figure to 2,800. What’s more, job losses have fallen disproportionately on its British operations.
It is one of many instances where Softbank’s promise to be a committed long-term owner has not stood up to scrutiny. One of his first acts was to sell a slice of Arm’s Chinese operations to investors which it later emerged had connections to the Communist Party. It was a move that undermined Arm’s status in one of its most important markets as Beijing sought to install regime-friendly directors on the board.
Son also offloaded a 25pc stake in Arm, worth around $8bn, into the Vision technology investment fund it had formed with Saudi Arabia, with the ink of its takeover barely dry.
Then with the Vision Fund clocking up astronomical losses, Softbank sought to quickly flog the entire company to American rival Nvidia, a deal that Arm’s co-founder Hermann Hauser warned would be “a disaster”.
The deal was eventually blocked by competition regulators and Son now wants to float Arm in New York instead despite a last-ditch attempt by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng to persuade him to choose London instead. If their pleas are ignored it will be a final snub.
Genuine foreign investment is vital but it should not be confused with selling off the crown jewels of British industry and technology. There are plenty of examples of the former: Nissan pledging to build a giant battery factory in Sunderland; Google building its glitzy new European headquarters in Kings Cross; and Lidl’s announcement on Tuesday that it is looking to hire 1,000 new jobs as part of its latest expansion plans.
But to conflate these sorts of concrete pledges with Pfizer’s attempts to swallow a critical UK corporate giant like Astrazeneca, or a private equity consortium’s debt-fuelled purchase of supermarket chain Morrisons is ridiculous. It is like comparing apples and pears.
The former creates jobs, is good for skills, and helps with leveling up. The latter, with its surrender of command and control, often results in job losses, a reduction in R&D, the disappearance of intellectual property, and less investment.
If the Government is serious about pursuing an unashamedly pro-growth agenda, Liz Truss must learn quickly to differentiate between the two.
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